


Five Words They Knew and One They Didn't

by misslonelyhearts



Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-28
Updated: 2013-11-01
Packaged: 2017-12-30 18:32:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 4,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1022000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misslonelyhearts/pseuds/misslonelyhearts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Taken from a word-meaning meme, Varric and Hawke doing what they do best. Being sexy and breaking my heart.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Autolatry (Varric)

**Author's Note:**

> Autolatry - The worship of one’s self.

For a little while now he’s told one version, often a lie, with a quill in his hand, and found himself capable only of truth with his cock there later on.  A scrap of parchment was all it took.  Because the popular version, also a lie, was that he played hard to get. But the truth was that he got hard.  
  
It started with ink, his name leaning and blotty somewhere near Hawke’s, in Athenril’s cypheric scratch. Looking at its plainness on the big, stone table made Varric shift in his chair. There were countless comforts for the stiffening against his leg, straining the whiskered trouser crease, but only one he’d employed for more years than he would ever say.  So with his eyes on the names in front of him, he eased his cock along under the fabric.  
  
She’d gotten the note from Athenril, tucked it away, and then retrieved it from some damp place between her leathers and breastband when Varric had asked to see it.  Afterward, he’d watched her readjust the band, and had found his own hand sliding up to scratch his chest. For the rest of the day he’d glanced at every little unbothered way she’d plucked at the crotch of her pants, stretched her back, rubbed her neck.  A whole day he’d spent surreptitiously readjusting _himself_ like a boy in his first ball-hugging party garb.  
  
But in his room, in his chair, one knee hooked over the arm, looking at the names as they followed one another on the page was more than loneliness and better than booze.  Hawke was like a great, gasping yawn demanding the same, and Varric didn’t fight that mirroring instinct. They’d been back to back, victorious in almost every sense.  He liked looking over his shoulder to appreciate the view, and not because he had to.    
  
Following Hawke meant he was often up to his considerable nose in bodies, while hers did the leading.  It appealed to. . .him.  He fingered the cloth-covered ridge poking at his belly.    
  
Fuck realizations.  
  
Varric pulled open his laces, stroked himself under and over, and begged for direction.


	2. Sphallolalia (Hawke)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sphallolalia - Flirtatious talk that leads nowhere

She never wiped the lip of the flask because the flavor was too good.    
  
The whiskey tasted like it ought to, not like someone’s thrice-removed idea of it, but there was also the taste of Varric’s mouth.  When Hawke drank from his flask, she got sharp, scent-shaped pictures in her head: his tobacco and the pouch it came from, the briney sweat below his lip, the wintergreen he’d started chewing after Merrill showed him how.  
  
Because she was staring, Varric handed her the flask. Hawke drank, and those thoughts of him bloomed hotter than the whiskey’s burn.    
  
They sat on the high, sunbaked wall overlooking the Qunari compound, their legs dangling between half-rotted spikes, and passed Varric’s flask back and forth like a story told in tandem.  From that height, she could see the entire harbor and the oily green of the bay beyond.  
  
“Remember how they came ashore after the storm?” she said.  Varric nodded and took his flask back.  Hawke leaned forward to watch the Qunari, not so much milling about as much as attempting to imitate or intimidate the very stone around them. She wasn’t sure. “I thought, ‘Now there’s some tough seaman.’”  
  
Varric snorted.  
  
“A hard docking, for sure,” he said.  She watched him sip and followed his gaze down, past his knees, to a pair of nearly naked Qunari close to the wall. They wore an indifferent suggestion of smalls.  
  
“Can’t brace for _that_ impact,” said Hawke, shifting closer to Varric’s shoulder. Half covered by the shade of a tent, the Qunari took no notice of their audience. She watched their bare-assed display as they submitted to what appeared to be a fresh coat of that crimson body paint, applied by a stone-faced warrior with a brush the size and shape of-  
  
When she bit her lip and made a sound in her throat Varric smiled knowingly.  He held out the flask.  
  
“You know, Hawke, conquering your lusty heart is not a demand of the Qun,” Varric said.  She tugged the whiskey from his hand and he shook his head. “Should it be?”  
  
“Mmm, I’ve got a couple of roles to be filled,” she murmured behind the mouth of the flask.  Liquor flowed. It tasted like bravery and backwash.  
  
“We call that the Arishocker,” Varric replied with a raised eyebrow.  Hawke shivered.  They kept their eyes downcast, drawn to the exposed Qunari muscles, and the surprising trail of white hair twisting like uncharted rivers down a couple of chiseled abdomens.  
  
Their shape and posture reminded Hawke of granite fortresses, choked with vines, in the perpetual mist of a forgotten place.  Bloody whiskey.  She felt fingers on her hand as Varric took his flask back.  
  
“Why, Messere Greyloins, is that a spear in your breechclout or. . .” Hawke said, hand to her breast. “Oh, that _is_ a spear. Run!”  
  
“How disap _point_ ing.”  Varric joked but couldn’t see over the flask.  Angry faces turned upward, golem-slow, to locate the sound of Hawke’s voice.  Varric was still chuckling to himself, swigging the last mouthful, as they approached.  
  
“No, I mean run,” she said, panic rising in her throat.  She gestured at the Qunari where they were gathering against the wall, shouting for a ladder.  “They’re coming up!”  
  
Varric choked and sputtered. “Shit.”  
  
Hawke rolled back, jumped to her feet, and didn’t bother to wipe the dust from her ass while she and Varric scurried across the spiked roof.  But they were giggling, drunken fools as they ran from the rumbling Qunari storm below.  For a moment, heart jamming under her ribs as their mismatched legs leapt the shattered edges of the rooftop, she flushed hard with the urge to stop and let him crash into her. To turn and grab his hand.  
  
To lead him, like the whiskey, somewhere darker but just as warm.


	3. Lalochezia (Varric)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lalochezia - The use of abusive language to relieve stress or ease pain.

In his life he’d been witness to enough weird shit, a whole encyclopedia of fresh fuckery, to know that a million-to-one shot wasn’t the miracle everyone thought. More like one in thirty.  Odds on disaster were funny that way, especially in Kirkwall.  
  
So it was with perfect, cynical clarity that he watched the bandit’s tar bomb collide with Hawke’s tar bomb; A precisely mirrored trajectory of devastation for the unlucky bastard caught beneath it.  And Varric became a statistic in his own ledger.  
  
“Andraste’s two-ton shit,” he growled, and kept fighting while burning muck slithered into his eyes.

“Nugsucking son of a bitch,” he muttered wretchedly when it was over, and Anders knelt to help him, losing a whole duck’s ass worth of feathers in Varric’s tar-tacky coat.    
  
“Fuck,” they said in unison.  Misery loved company, and fashion.

It got no better for Varric, standing in Hawke’s mansion, dripping and stinking, his leather going crunchy in all its once-supple joints.  Hawke slipped Bianca gently from his shoulder, and Ancestors bless her for not bursting into belly laughs when gobs of tar plopped from his armpits onto the rug.  
  
“Maker’s breath, Varric you’re tarred and feathered!” said Leandra.  She rushed forward, and he wanted to be eaten up by a dragon rather than face her like this. “Nevermind, take those clothes off at once.”  
  
“Madame, no offense but I’d rather throw myself into the Waking Sea.”  
  
Leandra stopped.  She folded the fine towel she’d been offering over her arm.  
  
“I’ve never mistaken you for a thundering fool, nor have you ever mistaken me for a wilting flower,” she said.  “Starting now would be in poor taste, don’t you think?”  
  
The lady crafted a point finer than any dwarven smith.  Any other time and he’d have loved her for it.  Varric started at his gloves and boots, near to weeping at the state of his sash and shirt, the embroidery gummed to black, wormy stitches.  He took little notice of how Orana quietly whisked everything away until he stood in his smalls, bared before the Hawke women with nothing but his wit for cover.  
  
“Blighted flaming ballsack,” he said, crossing his hands over his crotch. “How’s that for wilting?”  
  
They put him in a massive, copper tub in the secluded garden behind the kitchen.  The tub had been designed for an estate’s significant laundry needs, but worked disturbingly well for one unfortunate dwarf cleaning.  After several mortifying scrubdowns, Leandra left Hawke in charge of changing the murky, scum-foamed water with a fresh bath.    
  
To Varric it smelled like summer.  The soap had a greenish tang to it, grassy and flecked with citrus.  Recognition rained on him as the tar bomb had.  It smelled like Hawke.  The water was warm, the tar gone at last, and they were alone.    
  
Varric unclenched his jaw a fraction and sighed. He stared past the clothesline with his dripping smalls, marking a dagger of sun that strained down into the little square garden.  “Sod it,” he mumbled, and his eyes were closed when he felt Hawke’s finger on his cheek.  
  
“Is it terrible of me to find you incredibly sexy right now?”  
  
Damp to her rolled-up sleeves, sweaty and flushed from the disgusting chore she’d helped make of him, Hawke was a sight.  One that was, for now, just for him.  
  
“I can say, in all honesty,” Varric replied, “that would be the least terrible thing that’s happened to me all day.”  
  
She leaned fully over the edge of the tub and kissed him.    
  
Out in the world, they were diplomatic by force of circumstance, but when they kissed Varric tasted all of that exhausting subterfuge melt away. A more honest force took over. He pulled her closer, and held the back of her head while soapy water ran down his arms.  
  
“Where’s Bianca?” he murmured beside her ear.  Hawke hummed.  
  
“Sent off to Smith in Bodahn’s capable hands,” she said.

Too late he realized her arms had drifted into the bath. He shivered, but not for the breeze or the tepid water.  
  
“What about your capable hands?”  
  
“Don’t rush me, dwarf.”  
  
Under the water, her hands spanned his chest, thumbs dragging lightly down and down.   
  
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he said.  
  
And then she took his cock in hand, the only person who seemed to adore it as much as he did, and Varric thought he might have actually died in the tar-slick sawdust back at the warehouse.  Deserving this would have to be an afterlife joke, in deference to all those he’d wasted while living.  
  
“I’ll bet you a sov and an heirloom Antivan rug you will,” replied Hawke with a serious look. “Dream about it, I mean.”  
  
But if he dreamt, he never remembered, and this he didn’t want to forget. Like the way her tongue flicked out, demanding, right before he opened his mouth to her.

“Oh, sodding fuckstains, H-haw-”  He groaned while she grinned, and her fingers went around and up in a lovely little maelstrom.    
  
Varric slipped down in the tub, catching himself only because drowning before the finish would’ve been rude. He wasn’t into cliffhangers, personally.  When she snuck a long finger behind his balls, his teeth snapped together.  
  
More curses lined up, neat as setting type on his tongue, and with her hands on him Varric gave them all Hawke’s name.  He imbued them with her eyes and her grip, the salt-damp curve of her lip.  Curses jerked the corners of his mouth, and dried on his tongue as Hawke worked his cock under the water. And though he was years beyond caring to remember the exact shape and timbre of prayers, he began to suspect that’s exactly what they were.


	4. Concilliabule (Hawke)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Concilliabule - A secret meeting of people who are hatching a plot.

Hawke lifted out the neck of her sagging blouse and looked down inside.  Her breasts were smaller, better-shaped maybe, but small.  Her hands, too.  She smiled.  
  
The mirror was a tool of change, it said so right on the cracked frame next to a dozen warnings, and though most of her friends interpreted its use as vain self-deception Hawke disagreed.  It conjured helpful disguises for moving around unnoticed and unscathed.  She used it all the time and she was still the same old Hawke, right?    
  
The mirror didn’t lie, exactly, but on this particular occasion it _did_ make a brilliant-looking dwarf out of her.    
  
Varric made a gravelly sound, releasing a long breath.    
  
“What? No good?” Hawke said, and gave a sharp turn-around to get a better look at her newly rounded dwarven backside.  Her trousers lay in a puddle around her feet, too big and long now for her short legs.  Inside her boots, Hawke wiggled her nubbin toes.  
  
Varric licked his lips.  
  
“Say something or I’ll change back,” she said.  
  
His face was all confounded anguish, unable to look away while whispering to himself, “This is what it’s like. Speechlessness.”  
  
“While you’re busy scrounging for words, would you mind lending me your tunic?”  
  
They were eye-to-eye, Varric even slightly taller now.  Hawke reeled from it.  She stepped out of her pile of human clothes and went to him.  Like a blood thrall, Varric shed his duster and sash, eyes never leaving Hawke’s body, and when he stood barechested, meeting her gaze without either of them craning, Hawke gave a small shudder.  It seemed to wake him.  
  
“Outside of Bianca, you’ll always be the most gorgeous thing I’ve ever seen,” said Varric.  Slowly, he ran ungloved hands over her shoulders and down her plump arms.  “But I’d be lying if I said anything other than. . .I’ve never wanted you more badly than I do right now.”  
  
She reached out to give him a rub and a squeeze.  
  
“Don’t hurt yourself,” said Hawke. “You’ll be lying again before you know it.”  
  
“Ancestors, Hawke.”  From the moment he started, Varric never stopped touching her.  “Come here,” he said.  As if she’d ever do anything else.  
  
He bent - _had to bend_ \- to suck the curve of her neck and shoulder.  Hawke yanked him closer, whispering, “We should give this disguise a thorough inspection.”  
  
In between a flurry of kisses, and happy, thick-limbed groping, Hawke remembered their onlookers. She threw her blouse over Xenon’s dried-horror of a face, and then made a twirling gesture at the Urchin and his golem bookend.  They rolled their eyes, or the stony approximation of it, and turned around.  
  
Xenon coughed, his great voice vaguely muffled under her shirt.  
  
“Weeeee’ve had uuhmmaany vigorous luuuhvers in the Emporium,” he said.  “Pleease, do go on.  Thaddeus nnhhdoes not mind.”  
  
It was permission they scarcely acknowledged.    
  
For a few lost hours they fucked on the floor of the Black Emporium; An old act made artificially new.  They stood, braced and groaning against the mirror itself. Bent over the crafting table, hunched and sweating, they reveled in creating a perfect fit.   _Beautiful_ , Varric said more than once.  Hawke hummed and hooked her stocky thighs around his shoulders.   
  
Did she taste any differently?  Her voice was deeper, but did her moans sound the same? Did she feel tighter and stronger?  Varric was too distracted to answer, and Hawke brimmed, cresting, loud as always. A fist-shaking riot of one for anything but reality.  He gave her a smug, idiot’s smile when she came.  
  
“I think you broke me,” Varric grumbled, breath hot on her chest, and he’d never sounded more content.  Hawke looked down at her petite fingers tangled in his hair.  
  
Like any transient lie the mirror had not changed her much.  Only for now she was a little closer to the ground and, for him, maybe a little too close to home.


	5. Quidnunc (Varric)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Quidnunc - One who always has to know what is going on.

The mabari woke him.  Despite his grogginess, Varric was pretty sure that the sodding dog had been instructed to keep to the floor under the table when they’d finally dipped into sleep.  
  
But Hawke was gone, the increasingly comfortable shape of her replaced by a heavy-breathing avatar, and Varric was surprised to find that he wondered why.  
  
Swampy dog breath assaulted him. He pushed away the bristled muzzle nosing at his head, and the mabari whined.  
  
“I’m up.  Andraste’s flaming ass, I’m up.”  
  
He dressed, lumbered into the Hanged Man’s darkened corridor, and watched the mabari inspect and dismiss a shadowy figure there.  
  
“Clandestine meeting?”  Isabela said, yawning.  
  
“Do we have any other kind?”  Varric gave her a shrug.  
  
The rest of the tavern was dim and quiet, all but one fire doused.  Varric spied the shape of the dog as it stalked between the tables toward the door.    
  
“You’re up early.  Or late,” said Corff.    
  
Varric nodded, hand on the threshold.  The way the dog looked up at him, he almost believed an explanation was right there on the tip of its soggy tongue. But that'd be too easy.  Instead, the mabari whined again and clawed at the door.  
  
They shuffled out together into the cool night.  Varric rubbed his eyes and shifted Bianca with an irritated grunt.  The dog led him through the city, ears perked and nose pointed steadily onward, snuffling at pisstains here and there but always moving.  Varric felt ridiculous, the dog might as well have been a bronto beside him.  
  
“Where are you headed, serrah?” A Hightown guardsman approached them.  But he stopped as Hawke’s mabari ambled past, and a stricken look, one reserved for iron-fisted captains, spread across his face. Varric thought he might salute the beast. “Ah, good night then.”    
  
“Where  _are_  we going, eh?” Varric mumbled, but the dog loped ahead, his goal in sight.    
  
The Hawke estate.  Instead of the front entrance, though, the mabari skirted the mansion’s perimeter and took Varric to the rear garden gate.  High, ironwork bars stretched up, taller than any human.      
  
Varric scowled.  The dog sat.  
  
After a few attempts, he picked the lock and unlatched the gate from the outside.  He watched the mabari’s brindled shoulders moving through the moonlit garden.  But, half of Varric’s blighted good sense remained on the Hightown flagstones while the rest, more persuasive by the minute, beckoned him to follow the dog into the house.    
  
She’d left.  It wasn’t the first time, and it was fine.  Why push?  
  
But he did push, shutting the creaking gate behind him to follow where the mabari had disappeared.  Which turned out to be a clever, dog-sized hatch concealed within the larger kitchen door.  With his luck, it was mostly Varric-sized too, but it wouldn’t be pretty or dignified.  
  
“Sorry sweetheart, “ he said, and eased Bianca through first.  He crawled after her, wrenching his shoulders painfully, spilling like a red-faced overdue baby onto the kitchen floor while the mabari gave him a head tilt.  Varric swore and got to his feet.  They crept together through the vast, silent rooms, Varric feeling like the worst kind of thief.   
  
Four times.  She’d left in the middle of the night exactly four times.  He’d counted, and that was something.  
  
He climbed to stairs to Hawke’s room, but the fire was cold and the bed empty.  Varric lit the lamp on her desk and stopped.  Her journal lay open in the sudden splash of warm light.  So, he pushed.  
  
She’d written her entries like letters, from the big stuff down to everyday nothings.  They read, from the earliest to most recent:  _Dear Father_  and  _Dear Carver_ , and then  _Dear Bethany_.  Several blank entries began _Dear Mother_.  Out of habit, Varric thumbed past the bulk of empty pages to the very back where she’d scribbled a single, smallish passage -so like her to skip to the end- addressed to no one.  
  
 _It must be divine humor.  If a memory is all that’s left you, and a memory’s just pretty silence, who’s going to reassure you that your choices have been worthy of them?_

“Yeah,” he said, struck by the rust in his voice.  
  
Varric rubbed his eyes and flipped the journal closed.  Out in the hallway, a door squeaked.  He went to investigate, catching sight of the mabari’s rump as it disappeared into Leandra’s bedroom.  Inside, he found Hawke on the massive bed, curled fiercely around the dog where it settled down against her chest.    
  
The room smelled of dusty lavender.  Varric scratched his jaw and considered going, just leaving them like that, and groaned inwardly at the prospect of the mabari’s door in the kitchen. He could wake Bod-  
  
“There’s room,” Hawke said.   
  
And because it was true, because that’s all the place offered any more, Varric stayed.  
  
“Just wanted to make sure you were. . .” he said, already laying Bianca aside, stripping off his coat.  _Okay_ _._   She didn’t move, but the crack in her dark voice pulled him closer.  
  
“Can’t check on me from over there.”   
  
“Alright, just this once.”  
  
Varric undressed while she feigned sleep, breathing lightly. His boots thumped on the rug.  When he climbed into bed behind Hawke, the mabari gave him a quick look, a flick of the ears. Triumph for his attempted banishment under the table.  Too bone-tired to confront the impropriety of it, Varric succumbed to Leandra’s oversoft bed.  Hawke reached back and pulled his arm around her.  He kissed her neck.  
  
“You know, sleeping in Hightown won’t make a snooty noble out of you,” she said, like one who’d worn herself ragged trying.  
  
“And sleeping at the Hanged Man won’t make a dirty lowlife out of you,” Varric replied.  He yawned.  “Not in my room, anyway.”  
  
Strange as it was, in Leandra’s room he guessed they hit the mark somewhere in between.


	6. Anagapesis (Hawke)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Anagapesis - The feeling when one no longer loves someone they once did.

No matter who told the story, with which indulgences and in what order, it was time more than anything or anyone else that screwed them but good in the end.    
  
She hadn’t known that’s what it would be until they stood on the pier, the same as every other dockside moment in six years except for the smell of chaos and voidfire.  They kissed like casual people, like there’d be time and expectation for another and another, and then Varric squeezed her too tightly.  So she knew.  It was that and the screaming.  
  
“I’ll be, I don’t know, _around_ ,” Hawke said.  
  
“Sure, and I’ll be viscount,” replied Varric.  He rubbed the back of his neck.   “The door’s always open, you know, ‘cause someone’s kicked it down. Mind the bloodstains while we’re redecorating.”  
  
“I mind them,” Hawke replied, looking anywhere but up.    
  
“Me too.”  
  
She dropped his hand because he wouldn’t.  
  
“Do something about that, will you?” she said, boarding the barge.  Deckhands dragged the gangplank away, grating out a goodbye they wouldn’t say.  
  
Once upon a really awful time, there’d been a dirty city by the sea, crammed to its piss-filled gills with a miserable soup of nobility and destitution.  Brutally hewn white towers behind steadily greying walls dug their roots into a lie called industry, sunk down into the murksome cliffs, where their foundations consisted mainly of bones and shit.    
  
She’d seen worse.    
  
Then, upon a more agreeable time indeed, there’d been lots of drinking and fondling of words as much as weapons, and quite a bit of skin.  Hawke had been a struggling city herself, with Elven spirit and Tevinter technique, Rivaini gilding burnished with Orlesian and Ferelden pride.  And through it all there had been this Dwarven core of unbreakable support.  
  
She’d been worse.  
  
Worse shot itself from the stone-holy center of Kirkwall like a righteous, sulphuric orgasm straight into the clouds.  A whole city bowed its head in the terrible, molten rain of it, not unlike the statues in the harbor it had politely declined to comment on for a hundred years.  
  
Eyes watering from the stench, Hawke pulled Bethany’s scarf up around her nose and meant to wave to Varric on the pier. Instead, her body shook at the sight of him receding, with the city like a busted mausoleum on fire all around him. The damned didn’t seem to care about their wrong funerary rites.  
  
With her smallish, grim-faced family Hawke had sailed into Kirkwall from the quaking water of the bay.  She left it, altogether too poetically, alone and by way of a fertilizer barge.  Crap in, crap out as they said.  
  
She wiped her eyes in time to catch him waving.


End file.
